#293: Beneath The Headlines AND The Trends

EXCERPT:
As much as I like and recommend John Allen, Jr.’s new book The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing The Catholic Church, I have a serious problem with one section—and it’s taken me a few weeks to figure out what it is.

Among the trends Allen analyzes is the rise of what he calls "evangelical Catholicism," and his analysis includes the impact of this rise on "liberal Catholicism."...

Reading and reflecting on Allen's account, I've had three distinct reactions.
The first is that I instantly recognize both "camps." …
My second reaction is that I belong to neither camp -- and I know many Catholics who keep me in good company...

All this leads to my third reaction: something is missing from Allen's analysis...As early as 1987, in a Miami Herald op-ed piece marking John-Paul II’s second US visit, I described a third “camp” of Catholics—Catholics who reject both the evangelicals and the liberals. We think evangelicals who “build a fence around the faith” are repeating the failed “quarantine” strategy of Vatican I, which was already rejected at Vatican II and replaced by the Council’s “inoculation” strategy of engagement with the modern world. We see liberals as preoccupied with internal matters, when engaging the modern world was Vatican II’s priority.

To us, it seems both those camps have lost faith with the long-term effectiveness of Vatican II: one camp fears engagement has gone too far, the other feels reform has not gone far enough. My trouble with Allen’s two-camp account was that it leaves out the very people who remain convinced of the Council’s continued relevance.

I suspect the key to my trouble lies in Allen’s focus on the idea of "trends."...The fact is there is a movement deeper than trends. Catholicism, so ancient and vast, mostly tends to move in history much like the slow, barely noticeable but inexorable pace of the ancient vast tectonic plates drifting beneath in the earth's surface. But just like those plates, Catholicism occasionally (even without warning) suddenly shifts, causing abrupt changes in faith’s landscape. Such "Churchquakes" give way to pressures that have built for centuries, and their aftershocks last centuries as well.

Vatican II was just such a seismic spasm, as both John XXII and Paul VI acknowledged by calling it Catholicism's "Second Pentecost." If Pentecost marked the Church’s birth, they dubbed Vatican II its rebirth.

Clearly Allen's focus is deeper than headlines--but his frame of reference is the 21st century, and especially its first half. The book is a futurist exercise, full of predictions that get too risky if projected too far out in time. So Allen's real focus lies between the headlines that skim today’s surface currents, on the one hand, and the centuries-long dynamics that give global (and Catholic) history its deep structure--a structure characterized, not by trends, but by the alternation between glacially-slow drifting and sudden, seismic shifting.

If I am right, the seismic shift of Vatican II lies too deep for Allen's analysis...